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Libro Miscelanea 52.Indb KNOWABLE CONSPIRACIES: A REASSESSMENT OF FORMAL AND IDEOLOGICAL ASPECTS IN JONATHAN FRANZEN’S THE TWENTY-SEVENTH CITY Jesús Blanco Hidalga Universidad de Córdoba [email protected] 13 1. Introduction: complicating pictures Jonathan Franzen is one of the most prominent American novelists of our time both in terms of sales figures and critical assent, but his work has given rise to a conspicuously small amount of academic criticism to date. A significant part of that academic engagement with Franzen’s work has been of a political nature and for the most part rather critical. Thus, Franzen’s third and highly successful novel, The Corrections (2001), was rather censoriously analysed by Annesley (2006) from a political point of view. Evidently influenced by the latter, Hutchinson (2009) and Hawkins (2010) provided accounts of Franzen’s work which also included an analysis of his previous fiction. In spite of individual differences, all three critics coincide in denying Franzen’s work a truly progressive character and even accuse the novelist of inadvertently reinforcing the system he is out to criticize. Although their assessment concerns chiefly The Corrections, Hutchinson and Hawkins trace to Franzen’s first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), the origin of what they see as Franzen’s inadequate ideological stance, namely a deterministic view of the capitalist system as an intractable entity immune to all attempts at progressive reform. The problem with categorical dismissals such as this is that they often prevent in-depth examination and attention to the wider ideological context. Thus, while acknowledging some grounds for these critics’ claims, this article aims miscelánea: a journal of english and american studies 52 (2015): pp. 13-30 ISSN: 1137-6368 Jesús Blanco Hidalga to complement their somewhat reductionist view of The Twenty-Seventh City with an ideological account that is attentive to the historico-cultural determinants which act upon Franzen’s political stance, as well as to the ideological constraints at play derived from the specific formal characteristics of the novel. This will be accompanied by an assessment of the novel’s Utopian stake in the light of Fredric Jameson’s theory and a new appraisal of its place within the whole of Franzen’s work. In matters of form, Franzen’s career is characterized by a stylistic evolution from a postmodernist-influenced fiction to a more traditional, realist narrative. In this regard, The Twenty-Seventh City has often been ascribed to the distinctively postmodern genre of the Systems novel. Certainly, the scope of the novel’s social critique is wide enough to be called systemic. In the same way, the motif of conspiracy, elevated to postmodernist fetish by Pynchon and DeLillo, plays a fundamental part in this novel. As Franzen has put it, he adopted “a lot of that generation of writers’ concerns —the great postwar freak-out, the Strangeloveian inconceivabilities, the sick society in need of radical critique. I was attracted to crazy scenarios” (in Antrim 2001). Thus it is that, in a rather typical Pynchonesque 14 way, the novel’s scenario is indeed weird: a cabal from India infiltrates the St. Louis police force with the aim of gradually taking control of the city’s politics and economy. However, Franzen’s strictly narrative-formal development is a considerably more complex affair than critical accounts usually imply and this is reflected in The Twenty-Seventh City. On this subject, we will be discussing how The Twenty-Seventh City, commonly taken as the most markedly postmodernist of Franzen’s novels, presents certain distinctively realist attributes, namely an obvious topographic quality, a calling —even if not fully realized— for the representation of different social groups as inextricably connected, a world view relentlessly based on contingency, and, not least of all, an aversion to showing radical social change all of which may be regarded as nothing but realist. This makes for a remarkable, unresolved tension between the two different approaches to the novelistic form, the realist and the postmodernist, which coexist within The Twenty-Seventh City.1 As one of the most influential critics of Franzen has argued, there was always a realist writer in Franzen, “hidden beneath all the Po-Mo machinery” (Rebein 2007: 204). There are some interesting peculiarities as well in the novel’s conspiracy. Conspiracy has often been referred to by Jameson as a substitute for an adequate mapping of an all too complex totality (e.g. Jameson 1991: 38). In postmodernist fiction, usually influenced by post-structuralist theoretical tenets, conspiracies have often become a manifestation of the perceived impossibility of attaining any kind of unassailable social knowledge or meaning. In contrast, in Franzen’s first novel the conspiracy, miscelánea: a journal of english and american studies 52 (2015): pp. 13-30 ISSN: 1137-6368 Knowable Conspiracies: A Reassessment of Formal and Ideological… controlled by chief Jammu with a panopticon-style system of surveillance, is rather a narrative means to pry into the different power hubs of St. Louis, and as such performs an analytic function which is a main attribute of classic realism, as we discuss below. In a way, since, rather unusually, we are shown the two sides of the conspiracy —that of the schemers and that of their victims— we could speak, paraphrasing Raymond Williams, of a knowable conspiracy2, one that is intended to force the reader to listen and see and thus increase her social and political awareness. 2. The (non-)politics of irony: agency and apathy The ideological implications of Franzen’s implausible conspiracy of Indians may be further probed. Its sheer unlikeliness and the suspension of disbelief it requires, are revealing of the difficulty of conceiving radical change in a contemporary American society which has not only lost all trace of the relations of production but also the memories of any other modes of production. Hawkins argues that choosing a foreign origin for the conspirators enables Franzen to “render literal the xenophobia that is the byproduct of the exceptionalist nature of American nationalism” (Hawkins 2010: 65). It seems more likely though that what the Indian origin of 15 the plot really affords Franzen is the possibility of bringing forth a group of people who seem genuinely capable of transformative action. It is significant that such people must come from the Third World, a locus which for a long time has evoked in the Western imagination an “outside” —to use Jameson’s term— still unassimilated by totalizing systems. It simply appears that any such capacity for agency should be conceived on American soil. The (dubious) revolution must be imported then, smuggled in, under suspicious certificates of verisimilitude, from what Žižek has called “the mythical Other Place where the authentic happens […] and for which Western intellectuals have an inexhaustible need” (Žižek 2008: 108). The system, however, will prove unassailable and the conspiracy fails mainly due to generalized apathy. In the novel, the only foreseeable event of consequence is nuclear war, a possibility which does not seem to change the widespread torpor either, perhaps because after all an impending apocalypse renders any prospective change pointless. Consequently the novel ends with a suffocating atmosphere of stagnation which has earned Franzen hard-hitting criticism from otherwise perhaps not so distant ideological quarters. In order to fully grasp the nature of this critical animosity, we need to briefly examine the novel’s plot. The Twenty-Seventh City is a novel in which a group of Indian conspirators, led by newly-appointed police chief Jammu, are intent on carrying out a large-scale political and financial operation aimed at reversing the flow of capital from the increasingly derelict inner St. Louis to the affluent municipalities of the miscelánea: a journal of english and american studies 52 (2015): pp. 13-30 ISSN: 1137-6368 Jesús Blanco Hidalga surrounding St. Louis County. This initiative, which involves the administrative merger of city and county and the subsequent redistribution of wealth via taxes and business relocation, is presented as unequivocally reasonable and fair, a last chance for a city in a shambles. However, Franzen undermines this apparently desirable move from the very beginning. To start with, the operation is to be carried out by a rather improbable outfit, which cannot but weaken the credibility of the novel’s commitment to the actual viability of change. Then we learn that the conspirators, former Marxists whose methods are rather iniquitous, actually have spurious objectives: moneymaking by means of a large speculative operation. To make things worse, we are shown that the process is causing great social damage through gentrification and forced relocation of population to a forsaken ghetto. Finally, after a considerable build-up of expectation, the whole enterprise fails because people just cannot be bothered to vote on the referendum on the merger. The plot self-deconstructs, and the novel seems to collapse in what Hawkins has called “an act of novelistic bad faith” (Hawkins 2010: 67). Apathy reigns triumphant and any chances of intervention to change the status quo are rendered futile: 16 America was outgrowing the age of action […] With a maturity gained by bitter experience, the new America knew that certain struggles would not have the happy endings once dreamed of, but were doomed to perpetuate themselves, metaphorically foiling all attempts to resolve them. No matter how a region was structured, well-to- do white people were never going to permit their children to attend schools with dangerous black children […] Taxes were bound to hit the unprivileged harder than the privileged […] The world would either end in nuclear holocaust or else not end in a nuclear holocaust […] All political platforms were identical in their inadequacy, their inability to alter the cosmic order.
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